Israel has the veto on US policy

Israel has the veto on US policy

S P SETH

Having recently pounded and pulverized Gaza in their military operations, killing more than 2100 Palestinians, and with no visible progress to lift blockade of the Gaza Strip after the ceasefire, Israel is now turning elsewhere to annex more of Palestinian territory. This time it is the proposed construction of 2610 homes in east Jerusalem, part of the continued expansion of Israeli settlements and consequent eviction of more Palestinians. The capacity of the Israeli state to ignore all the relevant UN resolutions and the general world opinion, which regards Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as illegal, is astounding believing that Israel is a special case over and above international law and conventions. Even its closest ally that underwrites its security and provides all the military and economic aid shows at times frustration with its wayward behavior and defiance of the Obama administration. The new tranche of settlement activity in east Jerusalem has drawn sharper criticism from the US than is usually the case. According to Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman of the US state department, “This development [of more Israeli settlements] will only draw condemnation from the international community, distance Israel from even its closest allies, poison the atmosphere not only with the Palestinians but also with the very Arab governments with which Prime Minister Netanyahu said he wanted to build relations, and call into question Israel’s commitment to a peaceful, negotiated settlement with Palestinians.”

It is rather surprising that after the collapse of the marathon peace initiative by John Kerry, US secretary of state, the US still somehow wants to believe that Israel might have some residual commitment to a peaceful and negotiated settlement of the Palestinian question. It doesn’t. Kerry expressed his despondency and frustration at the time, to the great irritation and anger of the Netanyahu government, when he said that Israel would soon face the choice between “either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens--- or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish [majority] state.” Philip Gordon, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, recently said that, “How will it [Israel] have peace if it is unwilling to delineate a border, end the occupation, and allow for Palestinian sovereignty, security and dignity?” And he added, “It cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely. Doing so is not only wrong but a recipe for resentment and recurring instability.” Most of all, as President Obama reportedly said that Israel’s decades’ long occupation of Palestine is simply “unsustainable”.

But despite strong reservations of the Obama administration about the efficacy and humanity of Israeli occupation, it still stands by Israel and tries to make excuses for it time and again. It has to stop making excuses and do something concrete to make Israel see some sense that its obduracy on Palestine is neither good for its own security and stability but also puts US relations with the Middle East in a state of continuous acrimony, if not crisis. The US, therefore, needs to approach the Palestinian question with great urgency because it alone has the necessary leverage and capacity to make Israel see sense as its chief patron and security guarantor.

But as we have seen in the last several decades that this is unlikely to happen any time soon, principally because of the enormous clout of the Zionist lobby in the United States. And its chief vehicle is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A long article titled, Friends of Israel, by Connie Bruck in a recent issue of the New Yorker, has some interesting information about the AIPAC and its modus operandi to tilt the US political system in Israel’s favour. And for this it has a wide network at its disposal. For instance: “AIPAC has more than a hundred thousand members, a network of seventeen regional offices, and a vast pool of donors.” How does it work? Well, an important mechanism is funding the election of its chosen Congress members who are given a clear brief of what they are expected to say and how to vote on issues affecting the state of Israel. As Bruck says in her article, “AIPAC’s hold on Congress has become institutionalized.” It is difficult, if not impossible, to run for Congress without “hearing from AIPAC.” According to Brian Baird, a Congress member, “ And they [AIPAC] see us, members of Congress, as basically for sale. So they want us to shut up and play the game.” In their book, The Israeli Lobby and the U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, created quite a storm by their searing critique of AIPAC. But, by and large, the US remains steadfast in its support of Israel when it comes to the crunch. As a result, there is no need for Israel to change or adjust its position on the Palestinian question.

Despite the solid US support for Israel, there still is a view in Israel and among its supporters in the US that it is precisely the US meddling and periodic peace initiatives that are at the core of the problem. It is argued that such initiatives stand in the way of other, less ambitious, approaches to the Palestinian issue. In his article, “Israel and the US: The Delusions of Our Diplomacy”, Nathan Thrall explores this in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books. He argues that Israel’s supporters have some difference of opinion as to how best Israel’s interests might be served but they all back “the Israeli demand to place severe restrictions on the sovereignty of a future Palestinian state, with limits on Palestinian armament, border control, and airspace, as well as the presence in the Palestinian state of international security forces, Israeli early-warning stations, routes for Israeli emergency deployments, and a continued presence for some considerable period of Israeli troops.” Which, in effect, means institutionalizing Israeli occupation and give it a legal cover with the US promoting its international acceptance.

On the other hand, the US advocacy of a peace process where Palestine might have attributes of a sovereign state, in Thrall’s view and many other Israeli supporters, is problematic. Because: “It deprives any other third party--- whether European or Arab [and religious Zionists and ultra-orthodox Jews]--- of a meaningful part in the peace process.” He believes that, “… most Israeli voters, and many among the Palestinian elite, are quite at ease with existing conditions…” And his advice to the US government is that it should better leave the Palestinian issue alone because: “The potential benefits of creating a small, poor, and strategically inconsequential Palestinian state are tiny when compared to the costs of heavily pressuring a close ally wielding significant regional and US domestic power.” With views like this seemingly vetoing US policy on the Palestinian issue, it is no wonder that it will remain a festering sore in an already volatile Middle Eastern region.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

IS: it will be a long war

S P SETH

The world is everyday learning the scope and complexity of the situation in Iraq and Syria where Islamic State militants are apparently not deterred by the air strikes launched by the United States and its allies. While they have been contained in some places in Iraq, they have made advances in some parts of Syria, threatening the Kurdish town of Kobani starting an exodus of an estimated 200,000 Kurds across the border into Turkey. Indeed, the IS’ sudden emergence as a significant force, posing serious threat to regional stability and becoming a magnet for international jihadists, has taken much of the world by surprise, causing trepidation. In a recent television interview, President Obama admitted that the US intelligence agencies had under-estimated IS. On the other side of the equation, they had over-estimated the Iraqi army and state as capable of dealing with terrorism in all its forms. The ease with which the IS forces were able to occupy Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city with the Iraqi army making a run for their lives and abandoning the US-gifted arsenal for the IS, proves the point.

To quote Obama from his interview: “Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country that are completely ungoverned [ISIL was] able to reconstitute themselves [from the shattered al Qaeda outfit it was] and take advantage of that chaos.” And: “This became ground zero for jihadists around the world”. They advanced so fast that even Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region, seemed within their reach, only saved by US aerial intervention. While the IS is consolidating and even, at places, strengthening its hold in Iraq, the situation in Syria is even more dire. It is a witches’ brew of terrorist activity with the IS clearly the dominant jihadi group. The US aerial bombing there seems to have, for the time being, brought together the feuding terrorist groups behind IS.

And then there are the so-called moderate rebels that are preferred US choice to fight both IS and the Assad regime on the ground. They were supposed to be vetted by the US intelligence to qualify for US military assistance because of the fear that military weapons and equipment for them might fall into militant hands. But they reportedly would now receive an estimated $500 million worth of weaponry to confront apparently both the IS and the Assad regime. This looks like US policy on the run because nothing has really changed to ensure that they would be an effective force or, for that matter, their weapons wouldn’t fall into the militants’ hands. To further add to the confusion, there is the Assad regime, which the US is committed to overthrow with the help of the secular/moderate rebels.

In the present circumstances, the Assad regime would be a natural ally of the US against Islamic State. But such tactical arrangement against IS is virtually vetoed by the US’ Arab allies, like Saudi Arabia. This is because of the larger Sunni-Shia sectarian divide in which the Syrian regime of the Alawite (Shia) sect is regarded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchs as the Iranian dagger pointing into the heart of Sunni Arab lands. This larger sectarian power play led Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies into funneling funds and weapons into the hands of militant groups of which Islamic State has now grown into a monster threatening both Sunni and Shia regimes alike. And this is also preventing the US and Iran from cooperating fully against the common threat of Islamic State. Therefore, despite the US success in creating a broad international front against IS, including some Arab kingdoms, it is not making things any easier. Which brings home the bitter truth that air strikes by itself won’t stop IS, suggesting that combat troops would need to be deployed sooner, rather than later.

The Turkish government could play an important role to thwart IS advances, now that its parliament has approved its participation in the international coalition. But, despite all the international pressure to help the beleaguered Kurds in Kobani, just across the border, it is dragging its feet because it wants the US to undertake to simultaneously overthrow the Assad regime by putting up a no-fly zone in Syria as well as to create a security cordon across the Turkish border for Syrian refugees. At the same time, it worries that the focus on fighting IS might strengthen the Kurdish autonomy movement that Turkey has been trying to suppress over decades.

As pointed out earlier, the aerial war against IS would need to be supplemented with ground warfare. But there is still no consensus about who, among the coalition partners, will contribute the ground troops. The US and its western allies contend that it is the Arab’s fight and that they should be doing the actual fighting on the ground. And indeed the Iraqi military and the Kurdish Peshmerga are engaged in the operations against IS. But the Iraqi forces, despite all their training by the US over the years and with US-supplied weaponry, have been more adept at fleeing rather than fighting, though there are recent reports that their morale has improved and things might change for the better. This would remain to be seen. The Kurdish Peshmerga, on the other hand, are said to be motivated fighters and have been doing their bit, but they lack high caliber weaponry to confront IS.  In other words, the ground forces that are supposed to take on IS militants are not battle ready yet. That would leave the US and its allies to fill the gap at some point. But President Obama has made it clear that the US wouldn’t put boots on the ground, even though he has already sent 1500 combat ready experts as advisers and trainers.

One just has to wonder what would they do new in terms of training and equipment, which was not done during the time they were in Iraq from 2003 to 2011? Would that mean that the US might, at some point, put its own troops on the ground, as it considers IS a threat to its own security? The IS might even be goading the US in that direction if its recent statement is anything to go by. The statement said in part that, “You will pay the price when your economies collapse. You will pay the price when your sons are sent to wage war against us and they return to you as disabled amputees, or inside coffins, or mentally ill…”

Whether or not the US will put boots on the ground would remain to be seen. One thing though is clear. Which is that it will be a long drawn-out war.

Note: This article was first published in th Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au